Jupiter Project (5 page)

“Come on, it’s not that bad.” I said.

“Oh yeah?” Zak said sarcastically.

Ishi said mildly. “There is some truth in Zak’s words. But as well, our parents wish to protect us. Without thinking of it in so many words, they try to keep us children. It is difficult for them to see us as nearly adults.”

“Yeah, so to keep from dealing with our sex lives, they arrange it so we don’t have any,” Zak said.

“Let us say it is easier for them if they do not have to handle such delicate matters.”

Zak said. “Technical types are kind of shy anyway. They sweep the subject under the rug.”

“We don’t
have
any rugs in the Can.” I said. “But look, you guys make it sound like some kind of conspiracy.”

“Quite so, it is not,” Ishi murmured. “We are speaking here of an unconscious pattern. There are Marxist economic theories for this separation and anger between the sexes, of course. I have read them. But I do not think they truly explain matters.”

“The fact remains, Ishi, that you know a girl who is reachable,” Zak put in.

“Yeah.” I said, eyeing Ishi. He only smiled. The unspoken point was that a girl who would Do It for Ishi might Do It for one of us, too. I mean, it’s not a pretty idea, but that’s what I was thinking. I was pretty sure Zak was, too. In fact, Zak might have stage-managed this whole conversation to find out if Ishi or I knew any good candidates. He’s shrewd, ol’ Zak is. Not shrewd enough to solve the Getting Laid Problem, though. And even I could see we were thinking about this the same old way, with girls as half-enemy, half-ally, but, well, that’s the way the world
was.

Zak insisted, “You know a girl that we know, too. who—”

“Correct,” Ishi said, grinning.

“C’mon, who is she?”

“I’ll say no more, Zak.”

“Look, we won’t tell. We just want to know—”

“I’m not going to say.”

“Geez, at least you could tell us what it was
like.
I mean, is it—”

“I have told enough.” Ishi said it in a soft, even voice, and I could tell he meant it.

After that, nothing much more happened. Ishi put up with our grousing. He wouldn’t give away any more information about the mysterious Lady X who’d lifted the burden of virginity from his shoulders. Zak told a seemingly endless series of dirty jokes. I wondered if adults spent this much time on the subject and decided no, that was impossible. When you can
do,
you don’t talk.

Zak’s mother came in from her job in Physical Chem. She peered in at us, all scrunched together, and gave us a curious look. Zak hurried to erase the encoding for energetic Rebecca’s program. After that we joked around a little, the way you do, and then when there wasn’t anything more to say, I went home.

The tubeway lights were dimming as I walked home. The air pressure was dropping too, I knew, though the change was so slight I couldn’t feel it. The Can is more than metal walls and oxy bottles; it has to ebb and flow like a natural environment, to fill the human need for a rhythm, a cycle. It has some decidedly non-Earthside benefits, too, like the low-g sleeping dormitory, where you can get the equivalent of a full night’s sleep in about four hours. The way I felt, maybe I’d be using the dormitory tonight.

When I slid the door aside, though, my father was sitting in his favorite chair, reading a fax sheet and there was a toasty, cooking smell in the air. Troubles seemed far away.

“What’s on?” I called out.

“Salad, artichokes, veal, custard,” my mother said quietly, coming out of the small kitchen and wiping her hands on her apron. “And please do not shout at home.”

“He was only releasing a little tension,” Dad said. “He had to sit through one of my lectures today.”

“Oh?” Mom said, instantly concerned. “About—?”

“Yes.” Dad said. Evidently they had talked over my future before broaching the subject to me.

“Well, you needn’t be so glum,” Mom said. “The two of you look as though Matt was shipping for Earthside tomorrow.”

“Well, I am shipping for Ganymede in two days,” I said, making a try at changing the subject.

“I know, and we’ll miss you,” Mom said. “I don’t see why we don’t take our recreation trips together, when—”

“Leyetta,” Dad said. “A nearly grown boy doesn’t want his parents tagging along after him wherever he goes. We’re sandwiched into a small enough area as it is.”

“Hmmm,” she said noncommittally, and went back into the kitchen. “Dinner is almost ready.”

I used the time to stow my school work, straighten up my room and wash my hands. One of the troubles with living in the Can is the squeeze on space. My bedroom is about as big as a decent-sized closet on Earth. I have to keep it neat and put everything away in the wall drawers or I’d go crazy. I’m told we were all tested to find whether we were naturally orderly, before we qualified for the Jupiter Project. No slobs allowed. How they decided the eight-year-old Bohles brat was okay I can’t guess, but they did.

“Matt.” my father called, reminding me that I may have learned to be neat but I’m not always on time.

Dinner was good, as usual. Dad presided over the serving of portions and I dug in. I didn’t pay much attention to the small talk about events around the Lab until Mom said:

“I heard an interesting rumor today, Paul. The
Argosy
leaves in a week or two, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it must. That’s when the optimum conjunction comes up for the Earth-Jupiter cruise.”

“Well, one of the women who works in Hydroponics with me heard that Earthside asked for a personnel inventory several months ago.” Mom said.

“Surely they have that information already,” Dad said.

“No, they wanted a new assessment of everyone in the Laboratory. And that’s not all. Earthside asked if there were any jobs that weren’t getting done because we don’t have the time.”

“ISA thinks we’re shorthanded?” I said.

“I don’t believe the International Space Administration ‘thinks’ anything,” Dad said. “It is too large, like a dinosaur, to do anything more than stay alive. The higher functions are left for others.”

“Oh, Paul,” Mom said, and looked at him with an amused smile.

“Well, perhaps I overstated my case. ISA takes orders from the Association for the Advancement of Science, and somewhere in that anthill a few people decide what happens and what doesn’t.”

“Mom, do you think ISA will send us some more staff members?”

“I don’t know, I just work here. But that is what the rumor seems to imply.”

“Just a while ago Dad was warning me that ISA might ship a lot of us kids home when we reach eighteen.” I said.

“I will admit that does not seem to agree with the rumors,” Mom said.

“Ah,” Dad said, raising a finger. “There are several ways to interpret that. If ISA does send you back. Matt, they will have to replace you. The work must be done by somebody.”

“I wish you hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

“I’m merely guessing, son. A word of advice: don’t waste your time trying to fit one rumor against another. Everyone in the Lab knows there is some sort of administrative battle going on in ISA and that there may be changes in our work here. An atmosphere like that breeds rumors faster than your mother can grow this veal in her tanks.”

I took another mouthful, thinking.

“If ISA is going to send us more staff. I would like to know about it,” Mom said. “We will need the time to increase the farming cycle.”

“Dad,” I said during a pause in the conversation, “why is all this happening? Why is ISA rocking the boat now, after the Lab has been out here nine years?”

My father made a tent with his fingers and leaned over the red-topped table. “Like most human problems, it is a matter of too many things happening at once. Earth is running out of raw materials. The fossil fuels, like coal and oil and natural gas, are going. Those don’t hurt so much, because we have thermonuclear fusion to provide all the power we want. Fusion reactors drive the
Argosy
and the
Rambler
and run that electric light, there.” He pointed at the ceiling lamp.

“But once the oil is gone, what do factories use for lubricants? Where is the lode of iron? There simply isn’t any.”

“We’re mining the asteroids,” I said. “It’s not like we’re living during the Breakdown, in 1990 or—”

“Sure, that’s a help. In fact, without it Earth would have to cut back drastically and go without a lot of things.”

“It’s that serious?” Mom said.

“I am afraid it is. We have been isolated out here. Any outpost of humanity has a tendency to think of news from home as rather unreal, after a while. I have been following the news summaries sent out from Earth and it looks to me as though things are pretty bad. That Canadian war didn’t help.”

Mom frowned and tugged at her red hair. I suppose Dad hadn’t mentioned any of this to her either, before now.

“Look, Dad,” I said. “The asteroid mines are paying the way for the space program. Why should ISA’s budget problems affect us?”

Dad smiled ruefully. “We knew when we signed on with the Jupiter Project that this Lab was the poor relation of the asteroid program—right, Leyetta?” Mom nodded. “Well, it seems to me things have gotten worse. ISA knows very well it can get metals and rare minerals out of the asteroids. But what can they get out of us?”

“Why, why—lots of things!” I sputtered. “We’re finding out about Jupiter, the biggest planet in the system.”

“Give that young man a silver dollar—asteroid silver, of course.”

“Huh? Isn’t scientific research worth paying for?” I said.

“Matt, dear,” Mom said. “I think you are underestimating the importance of boredom in human history.” With that she got up and began clearing the table. I helped her in my usual style, balancing a saucer on a glass on a plate.

“Your mother speaks like the Delphic oracle,” Dad said, “but she is, as ever, correct. All those intelligent citizens back on Earth aren’t paying for knowledge. They want romance, adventure—vicariously, of course.”

“Adventure?” I said, putting the dishes into the electrostatic cleaner. “Out here?”

“Adventure is someone else doing something dangerous far away,” Mom said. “The Jupiter Project qualifies on all counts.”

“Aw, it’s not so dangerous.”

“Oh?” Dad said. He had gotten out a deck of cards and the cribbage board and was setting up for our standard three-handed game. “Here we sit, surrounded by the radiation from Jupiter’s Van Allen belts, in absolute cold, high vacuum, far from the sun, the nearest help seven months away at best, without even a planet beneath our feet.”

“Okay, it’s a little dangerous. But so is crossing a city street.”

“Getting hit by a commuter bus is ordinary, Matt,” Mom said, “but a meteorite is another matter.”

“Precisely. The trouble is that we’ve been pretty careful out here and nothing very exciting ever happens. That lets out the adventure part. The only thing left is romance.”

“Romance.” I said, thinking. “Oh, you mean hunting around for alien life forms.”

“Yes,” Mom said. She was straightening up the kitchen and making out a list of groceries to request for tomorrow. There isn’t much storage space so she has to plan ahead every day. She flicked on our stereo and light, mellow music flowed into the room and covered the faint noises from other apartments. She looked up at me. “Your father is something of a pessimist about Man as a political animal. But I do agree with him that the man in the street back home cares only about the chances of finding life on Jupiter, dear, no matter what else the Laboratory can do for science.”

“The only trouble is—woe is us—the Lab has not been able to find life,” Dad said. “I suspect the taxpayer and ISA both are getting tired of waiting.”

I spent a moment sorting out the leftover food from our plates and putting it into the disposal tube. Thirty seconds later it would begin a new career as recycled fertilizer in Hydroponics.

“What bothers me most about this damned business,” Dad went on, “is that some people in the Lab have known about ISA’s doubts for months now. A couple of department heads kept their ears to the ground. They’ve been trying to use that information to enhance their own careers—”

He stopped abruptly. One of Dad’s cardinal rules is, no talk about Lab infighting. Gossip is what people turn to when they run out of good conversation. I can remember him saying that there’s no harm in having nothing to say—just try not to say it out loud.

And Dad had started to violate one of his own rules. It meant he must be more worried than I thought.

Mom put an arm around me and said, “Come on, you two. That’s enough. Politics inhibits the reasoning processes.”

“Correct. Cribbage!” Dad said with new energy. “Sharpens the mind, lightens the soul. You’re three games down, Matt, as I remember. Leyetta, your deal.”

The next morning I spent with Mr. Jablons—the one who lost the chess game to Yuri—learning electronics in his low-temperature laboratory. A lot of our instruction is on a one-to-one basis, by necessity.

Take me, for example. I like electronics. I spent more than a year, back when I was twelve years old, building electronic detectors for our satellites. Kids are pretty good at small handwork like that, if you can get them to sit still long enough to get the job done. My specialty was a little beauty called a Faraday Cup. It measures the total number of charged particles that strike a satellite. They have to be built just right, or they’re worthless.

But after all, how many kids are interested in Faraday Cups? When I was learning about them Jenny was maneuvering skimmers and Zak was talking to computers. I comprised a class of one.

That’s the way I like it, too. Big classrooms with thirty kids crammed in, listening to an adult yak for an hour—well, you can keep it. That sort of education went out with the twentieth century and nobody misses it. I’ve heard they’re trying something like it again, though, back on Earth, because the taxpayers have started squawking about the costs of teaching programs. It’s just one more thing to
make
me glad I’m in the Jupiter Project.

When Mr. Jablons was satisfied that I understood the new circuitry he’d explained, he left me alone. I built a simple black-box arrangement, incorporating the new circuit, as an exercise. It filtered radio signals and passed one narrow band of wavelengths. I tried it out by listening in to some of the routine signals coming from our observation satellites near Jupiter, and the darn thing actually worked. I congratulated myself and walked down to the Education Center.